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Topobo

$149 for 50-piece set, $249 for 100-piece set MAKE readers: Use promo code “MAKE” to get 50% off! topobo.com

My living room looks like Darwin’s laboratory. There’s a multicolored, three-legged creature writhing on the floor. My daughter pulls off one of its legs, and connects it to its face. My son teaches it to walk. Much better — it’s really moving now! This is how you play and learn with Topobo.

This brainchild of the MIT Media Lab’s Hayes Raffle and Amanda Parkes is part construction toy, part kinetic memory robot. By combining passive construction pieces with active motor/brain hubs (learning servos) you can spend hours creating unlikely creatures with even more unlikely forms of locomotion.

My kids ( 6 and 3) immediately understood how to

record and play back the motion of their creations; press a button, perform a few poses, press the button again, and it’s alive! They were delighted to see the colorful creatures twitching, creeping, and lurching around.

Our only complaints: the Lego Technic-compatible peg connectors can be hard to remove, and we’d prefer battery power to being tethered to the wall with the power supply wire.

While I wished the motion memory could be saved between sessions, my kids had no interest in reproducing past creations. Topobo is all about exploring novel methods of movement, something my kids figured out before I did.

—John Edgar Park

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